Installing the old HDD into newish computer

[Matso]

Since my last thread on building a new PC a few things have went askew and I have yet to get the components and would not likely to be getting anything for the next month.

However I have acquired an unused and just as old AMD Athlon PC (at least that’s what I can deduce).

Since acquiring the PC I took the HDD from my old PC and connected it up and got it running and searched for files and found everything working. Then the next day it says that it wants the product key, as it does not recognise the drive. But it will not let me enter anything it just freezes.

So back in goes the original drive.

What I want to know is can I make my old WD HDD into a secondary drive and transfer files onto disk or external hard drive?

This computer will not let me defrag the original HDD could this mean something disastrous?

Matso

[Flakey]

You should be able to boot with the new drive and access the old drive okay. Windows will see the old drive as just storage. I do this a lot when repairing PCs.

[polonY]

You sure can. It will just pop up as another drive when you boot. I'm assuming it's an IDE drive and as such, it will have jumpers on the back of the drive. Make sure that it is set to either slave or cable select but not master. Cable select is generally the better performing option and it means you need to plug the drive into the right part of the IDE cable.